Opinion | Do We Really Need to Have a Cold War With China?

SHANGHAI — I wore pink underpants for a lot of final yr.

It was the 12 months of the Tiger, my Chinese language zodiac signal, when custom says that sick fortune will search you out. Pink underwear is meant to maintain you secure as a result of Chinese language demons supposedly worry the colour pink.

It didn’t work.

It was a tough yr. For many of 2022, we remained sealed off from the world by China’s strict pandemic coverage. Shanghai, my residence for the previous decade, endured a very traumatic Covid lockdown that stored us confined at residence for 2 months beginning in late March, scrambling to acquire groceries. Whereas locked down, we came upon that my spouse, who’s Chinese language, was pregnant. It took a mix of bluster and determined pleas to native officers to get us to a hospital for a prenatal checkup.

When the lockdown ended final June, I emerged, blinking into the daylight, to search out that China had been remodeled into America’s enemy. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was calling China a risk to “common values” in language that made me consider the U.S. containment coverage towards the previous Soviet Union. The rhetoric has solely hardened since then. At the moment China is labeled an “existential” risk to the US; there may be discuss of a brand new chilly battle.

Actually? Should we wage a brand new chilly battle?

From Shanghai, the thought appears absurd. The town’s individuals are immersed in American tradition, having grown up utilizing iPhones, sipping Starbucks espresso, following the N.B.A. and sprucing their colloquial English by watching “Mates” (there’s even a “Mates”-themed cafe in Shanghai, designed to seem like the sitcom’s espresso store, Central Perk).

Chinese language associates of mine studied in the US and hearken to American pop music. My spouse watched YouTube movies about child-rearing by U.S. influencers. Classic clothes retailers, a music lounge referred to as Jazz at Lincoln Middle Shanghai, the N.Y.U. Shanghai campus — the town incessantly, self-consciously, compares itself to New York. Many city Chinese language are nearer to American existence and sensibilities than they’re to these of their mother and father (and plenty of younger Individuals likewise have extra favorable views of China than the era earlier than).

My work sits on the intersection of those worlds. I edit books by Chinese language writers about their nation’s politics and financial system, publishing them in English in order that the West can perceive their views. We should attempt to perceive what they’re pondering, the inherited fears, traumas, resentments and intergenerational conflicts that form how they work together with us.

Simply beneath the paint on Shanghai’s fashionable new restaurant facades are slogans from the Cultural Revolution, nonetheless faintly seen in some locations, like scars within the psychology of an older era that make for a paranoid conservatism. This trauma is barely understood by youthful Chinese language, who’re shielded by censorship and a code of silence from realizing intimately the horrors of China’s current previous. China is a various society with contesting visions of the longer term, a nation continuously remaking itself.

The influential Chinese language students I work with nonetheless maintain a deep respect for the US, its values and its civil society. In actual fact, lots of the Chinese language whom I do know have extra confidence in America’s sturdiness than a few of my anxious associates in the US, who fret about Trumpism and what they see as different threats to democracy and liberal values.

Zheng Yongnian, a professor who holds a Ph.D. from Princeton and is an knowledgeable on China’s altering place on the planet, informed me that the Chinese language nationalist view of a rising China and a declining United States is way from universally accepted right here and that “many individuals, together with me, proceed to be constructive on the U.S.” Yao Yang, an economist who advocates for a strengthened social safety and welfare system in China, was impressed by the concepts of the progressive politician Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, the place Mr. Yao studied for his doctorate.

Some main intellectuals inform me that they resent Chinese language on-line influencers and social-media nationalists for a similar cause I dislike Fox Information: They’re opportunists, weakening their nation with lies.

Chinese language nationalists, leftists, financial liberals — it’s laborious to discover a Chinese language thinker alive right now who hasn’t been profoundly influenced by American society and tradition. The US has been a lodestar for China all through its reform period, which started within the late Seventies and continues to remodel the nation. For individuals who visited the US, usually to check, it was usually the educational expertise of a lifetime, nourishing a drive to make their very own nation extra trendy, stronger, higher.

The revisionist historical past wielded by conservatives in each China and the US threatens to carry again the fearful militarism of the unique Chilly Conflict, with its coups and proxy conflicts. Individuals inform ourselves that we received as a result of we have been the nice guys, simplistic language that’s being revived in Congress.

However we are able to solely hope to stay the nice guys by sticking to values like free speech, generosity and the arrogance that our tradition can stand up to problem. Sadly, these values are threatened when the Chinese language American Consultant Judy Chu’s loyalty to the US is questioned by one in all her congressional colleagues. They’re threatened when a invoice is launched to the Texas legislature that may ban Chinese language college students from the state’s universities. And so they’re threatened after we deepen ties with doubtful leaders like President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines — son of the corrupt and brutal former dictator — and improve our navy presence there.

We may win a chilly battle with China but nonetheless lose a few of what makes us nice. We toppled Saddam Hussein and crippled Al Qaeda, however at the price of decreased freedom in the US by means of prolonged powers for the N.S.A., the Patriot Act and the festering sore of Guantánamo Bay.

The US can badger China about its flaws all it desires. However is our final objective to attain political factors or to dwell in a peaceable world the place we cooperate on actual issues like local weather change? America is strongest when it leads by instance, by remaining open, beneficiant and free.

My son, a product of those two nice nations, was born in Shanghai in November. After I maintain him, I wonder if a battle or different troubles would possibly result in our deportation or power painful decisions on his American father and Chinese language mom. China’s individuals are nonetheless welcoming; strangers typically method me to say that they recognize having foreigners of their nation or to say issues like “U.S.A., primary!”

These candy and inspiring moments needn’t disappear. However we should make good decisions. Canceling an necessary diplomatic go to to China over a balloon was our selection; transferring previous that could possibly be our selection, too.

I simply returned to Shanghai from my first journey residence to Virginia in three years. To my aid, I didn’t sense belligerence towards China. Many individuals agreed with me that our insurance policies and political rhetoric didn’t make sense.

Possibly we’ll determine a greater approach ahead. However I’m conserving the pink underpants helpful simply in case.